The Life and Times of Jeff Squyres

I'll give him 10 more minutes, but that's it!

It was the end of an era last week.

The server lsc.nd.edu was put into semi-retirement last week. As Brian put it, it's now officially in "no-code" status (medical term meaning that if you flatline, no attempt is made to revive you). All web pages are now finally off that web server (it only relays to iu.edu now), and no one uses it for e-mail anymore.

Even I moved my main .forwards to point to osl.iu.edu. So I IMAP (SSL, of course) to osl.iu.edu. So lsc.nd.edu is now just waiting to die. That is, it's waiting for Dog or Curt to turn it off.

When the server is actually turned off, the name lsc.nd.edu will be transferred to wizard.cse.nd.edu so that .forward files will continue to work.

That server has worked faithfully for years. Thanks, lsc.

The Army has a highly-touted on-line electronic training package called CBT (web-based) -- can't remember what it stands for offhand. There's oodles of courses on all kinds of subjects. It's available to all Army personnel (and DA civilians).

They have a very small number of unix courses -- 4 Linux courses were all that I found. I clicked all they way through the first one (took about an hour) and then took the test. The course material was a bit dated -- it referred to RedHat 6.x stuff. Some of the material and test questions were over-simplistic -- I got two or three "wrong" because they assumed things or ignored all the details.

Since I didn't learn anything new from clicking all the way through the course material, I just took the tests for the other three tests without clicking through the corresponding material. I got 95%+ on the three tests.

I then caught the CBT Linux support dude on IRC and told him that the material was dated. He said that they were working on a whole new Linux course.

Whatever.

It looks like they also have various Microsoft certifications available through the site; I might do one or more of them just for the heck of it, especially since they're free.

When I walked out the front door of Greely Hall the other night, I apparently came out at exactly the right time -- the sun was setting was completely eclipsed behind the mountain, and the clouds were ringed around the peak.

It looked exactly like there was a ring of fire in the air above the mountain. Amazingly beautiful.

By the time I got in my car to drive away, the illusion was gone. I had really come out of the building at exactly the right time.

Even though several people told me it was "ok", I found a policy the other day that prohibits the use of personal PDAs with CECOM computers/networks. Oops (I've been synchronizing my personal Palm m100 with my Outlook calendar/tasks/etc.).

Once I found this out, I started the procedure to get an "official" PDA. To make a long (uninteresting) story short, I ended up with an HP Jornada. It's a WinCE device.

It seems to be functional, and has a few features that are nicer than my m100 did (especially w.r.t. synchronizing with Outlook).

my inbox shows up on the Jornada

all items are synchronized in real time instead of having to explicitly push a "synchronize" button

it can view excel and word files

You can connect to the Jornada through Windows Exploder and drag-n-drop files into it

Of course, typical to Microsoft products, it doesn't completely work. It doesn't have time zones (a feature I really love about DateBk4). After booting, the first time you remove the Jornada from the cradle, it won't synch anymore.

That is, when you put the Jornada back in the cradle, the synch software on the desktop tries to connect to the Jornada and eventually fail. <sigh>

The OCG annual meeting is this week at MSC.Linux headquarters in Orange County. Too bad I can't be there. :-(

Brian will be there in my place (well, strictly speaking, he was going to be there anyway -- but he'll be taking my place in the OCG Steering Committee meetings since I won't be there). We (the Steering Committee) have worked a bunch to firm up the OCG bylaws (there were some ambiguities from the original draft). They'll be voted on

I've heard that I will be nominated to the OSCAR Working Group Chair. We'll see what happens.

I'm taking a "Dity VAP" (Do It Yourself Vulnerability Assessment Program) class this week -- it's a Level 1 Certification class for the Army. Today was the first of three days.

The first half of today was spent reviewing the rules, regulations, and laws governing what we are and aren't allowed to do. It was pretty interesting, actually. It's a sobering thought that the first and fourth amendments (free speech and proper search and seizure stuff) apply to me -- from the other side. i.e., since I'm effectively the government, I have to ensure that I don't violate the first and fourth amendments by tramping on civilian rests.

Woof.

I chatted with Lummy this weekend and have officially decided to return to working for Indiana University on a part-time basis. Now that I've been here in the Army for about 2 months, I've got a handle on what the schedule here is like, how much work I have to do, and whatnot. After discussing the matter with MAJ F, I'm sure that I can do part-time research work for IU on nights and weekends and not impact my performance for the Army at all.

However, since I will now be paid for the work that I'm doing for IU, I can no longer use Army computers and networks for the things that I get paid for (dissertation work will technically still be ok in off-duty hours). So I got an account with a local ISP here in Sierra Vista -- I'll be doing a bunch of my work through a dialup modem. Uck. But I'll survive.

I have a built-in modem on my Dell laptop -- a winmodem. I've never bothered to try to get it to work under Linux because I never had a need to. So I did a little research on the web and found the linmodem project and downloaded an RPM binary for my Mandrake 8.1 kernel.

It worked like a charm the first time. It dialed out perfectly, and made the connection, but apparently the ISP hasn't created my account yet because the authorization failed (the sales droid told me this afternoon that they were doing maintenance tonight and might not have my account created until tomorrow morning).